If it meets your needs then that's fine I guess. But compared to Nero, in terms of functionality, it, and similar freeware products, are lacking, depending on what you need it for of course. For a start, I've never come across any free software which allows you to drop track-markers (or index markers! remember those?) into one continuous WAV file, which is a very important feature if you want to guarantee seamless, gapless joins in a piece of music you have created. Nero also includes last-minute pre-burn mastering tools like normalisation and EQ, as well as a waveform editor.

I see that CD Burner XP can read Nero .nrg files, which is quite good for free software.

I liked Nero (Nero 6). It could edit tracks with half hour gaps before bonus tracks on them, ad fade outs for songs with long noodly outros like Blind Melon's Time...It could be adjusted to play nicely with 90min CDRs which was important to me at the time. I used WMP to make a demo disc a while back, and to make one or two compilations for friends, but if I wanted to make lots for myself again, I'd want something that has Nero's abilities, probably...

I would only ever consider uncompressed audio which leaves WAV, uncompressed FLAC or AIFF.

I would lean toward the first 2.

Storage is cheap, no need to compress.

While storage is cheap, WiFi bandwidth is limited. If you are running a WiFi streaming system, there are real benefits to keeping the bitrate as low as possible. Any lossless format which lowers bitrate is worth using.

I would only ever consider uncompressed audio which leaves WAV, uncompressed FLAC or AIFF.

I would lean toward the first 2.

Storage is cheap, no need to compress.

While storage is cheap, WiFi bandwidth is limited. If you are running a WiFi streaming system, there are real benefits to keeping the bitrate as low as possible. Any lossless format which lowers bitrate is worth using.

By the way, what is 'uncompressed FLAC'?

I don't know if there is a COMPLETELY uncompressed FLAC option but when I rip my tunes I choose the minimum compression possible which generally leaves them around 900-1100 as opposed to 1410 for wav or aiff..

I would only ever consider uncompressed audio which leaves WAV, uncompressed FLAC or AIFF.

I would lean toward the first 2.

Storage is cheap, no need to compress.

While storage is cheap, WiFi bandwidth is limited. If you are running a WiFi streaming system, there are real benefits to keeping the bitrate as low as possible. Any lossless format which lowers bitrate is worth using.

By the way, what is 'uncompressed FLAC'?

I don't know if there is a COMPLETELY uncompressed FLAC option but when I rip my tunes I choose the minimum compression possible which generally leaves them around 900-1100 as opposed to 1410 for wav or aiff..

While storage is cheap, WiFi bandwidth is limited. If you are running a WiFi streaming system, there are real benefits to keeping the bitrate as low as possible. Any lossless format which lowers bitrate is worth using.

While storage is cheap, WiFi bandwidth is limited. If you are running a WiFi streaming system, there are real benefits to keeping the bitrate as low as possible. Any lossless format which lowers bitrate is worth using.

A single stream of CD quality data is about 1.4Mb/s, a good quality signal on Wifi will manage 54Mb/s, so at first sight there is no issue. However if signal is poor Wifi can drop back to as low as 1Mb/s, so keeping audio bitrate down can help. Even if signal is strong and you have multiple streams, or want to stream hires it is worth using FLAC.

Albeit you're scuppered if the mastering you want (assuming that is important to you) isn't readily available on the download or streaming site of your choice and you might want for yesterday once more.

Uncompressed FLAC is precisely what it says - EAC has an option to set the level of FLAC compression, and the lowest level is uncompressed - the file size will be of that around WAV. Thus the file will just have a FLAC wrapper i.e. header and footer etc and allow tagging.

Uncompressed FLAC is precisely what it says - EAC has an option to set the level of FLAC compression, and the lowest level is uncompressed - the file size will be of that around WAV. Thus the file will just have a FLAC wrapper i.e. header and footer etc and allow tagging.

I am not sure you are right. Do you have a link that shows flac '0' is zero compression?. The following link is to the sourceforge official documentation on the flac codec:

http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison_all_ratio.html

A flac setting of '0' gets around 57% compression in filesize on the music sample used in the comparison.

Increasing the number increases compression at the expense of processing time. '5' is often used as the best compromise between speed of encoding and filesize.

As has been mentioned many times, it doesn't matter what compression setting is being used for audio quality - when decoded, all files produce identical audio data.

Yes it is but, here's the point, so is FLAC and ALAC, you effectively rip the PCM and then zip it, when it's unzipped it's the same PCM that you get from an AIFF or WAV file. Nothing is lost, hence the term "lossless".